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WASHINGTON — With Al-Qaida militants surging in the Middle East and northern Africa, U.S.
law-enforcement officials increasingly are concerned about efforts to recruit and radicalize
American citizens by drawing them to the region and sending them back to this country to carry out
attacks.

FBI Director James B. Comey calls fighting the threat one of the bureau’s top priorities and
said the agency is working to identify and track U.S. residents who travel overseas, embrace
al-Qaida ideology and return to the United States.

“We are focused on trying to figure out what our people are up to, who should be spoken to, who
should be followed, who should be charged,” Comey said in a recent meeting with reporters.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said al-Qaida,
which has turned into a number of splinter groups, is just as ominous a threat as it was on Sept.
11, 2001.

“Al-Qaida is not on the run, but is, in fact, growing in strength at an alarming rate across the
Middle East and North Africa,” he said at a hearing last week.

Two cases of radicalized Americans surfaced last year:

• Nicole Lynn Mansfield, 33, a nurse from Flint, Mich., died in May while fighting alongside
anti-government militants in northern Syria. She reportedly tossed a grenade from a passing car at
Syrian government soldiers, who then opened fire on the vehicle.

• Eric Harroun, a former U.S. Army private from Tucson, Ariz., pleaded guilty in September to
conspiracy to violate arms-control laws after fighting in Syria alongside al-Nusra Front, a branch
of al-Qaida that the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization.

Harroun, 31, went to Syria on his own last January, posting images and videos on the Internet
showing the fighting and complaining about Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Two others in recent years were radicalized in Pakistan, and then returned to the U.S. and came
dangerously close to carrying out bombings in New York. Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-American,
schemed to blow up the subway with backpack bombs, and Faisal Shahzad, an American born in
Pakistan, attempted to detonate a car bomb near Times Square.